What do you DO with your pictures?

This is the third and final post in my series sponsored by Windows Phone.

I have no data to back me up, but I’m going to assert that on the very day one becomes a parent, the number of times per hour she snaps a photo increases tenfold. What do you think of my guesstimate?

My husband bought a new fancy camera to prepare for the birth of our first baby, though we quickly realized we weren’t going to master all of it’s functions or carry it around with us, and we exchanged it for something pocket-sized. This was before smart phones had kick-ass cameras.

I remember going to meet an old friend for dinner in San Francisco about five years ago. My son was two and stayed home with his dad. My friend asked if I brought any pictures, so I pulled my huge MP3 player with a video screen out of my purse and showed her a short video of Julian singing Wheels on the Bus.

“You’re such a geek!” she said about my power usage of the new-fangled device.

Now, I think if she asked me to show her pictures, and I pulled an envelope from CVS out of my purse to reveal prints, she might say, “You’re such an old lady!”

I’m sort of at a loss right now with what I should be doing with all the pictures I take. I love that they’re on my phone, with me all the time. Some are marked as “favorites” so that it’s easy to show off a smaller set, ie no pictures of my shoes.

It’s easy to share the images right from my phone on Facebook, Twitter, or via email. I do these one-click actions every day. I even edit the photos, cropping them, pumping up the colors, blurring out the edges, and playing with filters on the Fhotoroom app. But still they remain trapped behind a screen.

I think like many moms, I have a nagging feeling about photo albums I’m not putting together, the scrapbooks that will never be made. If once each year, I order a print or two and put it in a frame in our house, that seems like a success.

On the other hand, maybe that’s enough. Maybe the digital photo album we carry in our purses is not just the means, but also the end. Isn’t the sharing of images easier this way? My parents certainly get more photos sent their way via text message and email than they would if I had to mail prints. When I have dinner out with friends, we can all pull out our phones and give each other little slide shows.

Just like everyone has been saying that the best camera is the one you have with you, perhaps also the best memory book is not the one under your bed, but the one in your purse.

What do you think? Do you have dreams of doing something fabulous with your photos? What happens to your pictures after you take them?

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Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. OH MY GOSH. I get all crazy inside when I think of the millions of photos people don’t back up or print!!!

Every month, I print all the photos I take. I also back them up to an external hard drive, and I back them up to an online service as a failover (I’ve had external hard drives fail). The only photos I don’t print are my phone photos where I am okay if I lost them forever.

Each month when the photos come in, they get sorted into 3 sets. One album for Alex, one album for Nate, and the rest go into labeled photo boxes for me and Jon.

I wrote a blog post a couple of years ago about my system. Not much has changed except the online back up part of it:

Also… I have many groupings of frames in my house. This encourages me to hang something meaningful and get the images off my computer and out where I can see them. The most recent grouping is my favorite, it’s in my office:

Just yesterday I was going through our 1k+ photos of our 2 year old son in an effort to narrow down pics to be printed and made into albums for the grand parents. I didn’t finish and probably never will… At least I know I’m not alone.

Fear not! If you want to print them (which you may not want to….) I just last week discovered apps that let you order prints from your phone! I was so excited to try it out because I have so many darn unprinted photos and I think it would be more fun for it kid to look through an album of actual photos. I found this post and ended up trying the Walgreens and Lifepics apps. I liked Lifepics better and ordered to the local CVS.

I can’t handle printing out pictures because 1) expense and 2) they just sit in a box and I still don’t look at them. But I LOVE making picture books – I use MyPublisher, but Shutterfly also has a nice program, and there’s lots of others. I do little tiny ones after Christmas for the Grandmas with pics of the DS with them over the holidays. I do a HUGE photo book for DS every year (because I don’t do a baby book at all). Sometimes if I get a good Groupon or Living Social deal, I’ll use it for a little photo book for Mother’s Day, or just to say “hey, thanks for taking care of my kid for a week.” They turn out lovely, are much easier to display and share than photos in a box, and the grandmas LOOOOOVE them.

I have always been a picture-taking fool and after my little one arrived (1 year ago) my obsession has grown tenfold.

I’m a graphic designer, so I’m constantly designing things with my little one’s photos. Following a friend’s advice, I decided to make a photo book every 6 months (yes, I’m still working on his 6-12 month book…) I also make books for special occasions/holidays (otherwise the “6-month books” will be even more ginormous than they already are). I print most of my books on http://www.blurb.com.

I also design stationery and greeting cards, so I started making personalized thank you cards using photos of Little One.

I’ve also started swapping out older framed photos with more recent ones (he looks so different now that when he was an infant) and I created a collage with the old photos in his room (he loves looking at himself). I like the app PostalPix for printing square prints (i.e. Instagram): http://www.postalpix.com/

Wow, Laura. Wow. I guess you’re a professional so that makes sense. Interesting to me how you say “The only photos I don’t print are my phone photos where I am okay if I lost them forever. ” because those are now practically the only photos I take. So I would be crushed if I lost them forever.

Now pregnant with my second child I have decided it is an absolute must that I organise the copious amounts of photo’s I have of my first child who is now 3 1/2 before No. 2 is born. Because I can’t afford to print the thousands of photo’s I do have, I am condensing them down to my favourites and making them in to photo books rather then the old-fashioned photo albums. I can’t wait to see them all.

I make books on shutterfly too. They are on the coffee table and just have “greatest hits” pictures for every 6 month period (including before baby was born.) I find that they get looked at and enjoyed much more than the mass of pictures on the phones and computers because they are just there physically and not too overwhelmingly large. But it is daunting to pick like 100 pictures to represent 6 months, when you have thousands of pictures. One thing that helps me is immediately deleting any pictures that aren’t great right away.

We are big fans of Shutterfly. With thousands of pictures every year of the little one — I pull our favorites and promise to make one family album each year. Money and time constraints keep me focused, but I love having an album that also includes stories and anecdotes about where we were and what we were doing. Baby girl will have them someday — And she will probably dread moving the damn box around year after year, but at least she will have the choice 😉

@Kim and all the Shutterfly fans: it’s a great way to go. My mom makes a Shutterfly book after each visit with us. She writes text and uses the pictures. They are my kids’ favorite books to read and it comforts me to know that there is printed evidence of their childhood. You know, in case the Internet goes out of style someday.

@Whitney: I would love to! Let me gather my thoughts and I will get in touch with you soon. (shoot me an email if you can so that we can get connected)

@Whitney/photo book fans: I love the fact that your mom writes about the kids’ visits. I’ve been keeping a journal since my pregnancy and and use the text in making my books. It takes a bit of effort (some entries are literally one sentence!) but I’m so glad I did it. I never would have remembered the “firsts,” details, funny stories, emotions. (I’m a book/paper freak, but I admit I use the app MacJournal)

Now that my son is 1-year old, I plan to keep journaling, even if it’s just a few sentences a week. It seems to make creating photo books easier because you have a frame of reference — and reading it later is wonderful. If my little man inherited my sentimentality, he will love it too 🙂

Every year, we make a photobook of the kids for the grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc. It allows us to really highlight the year and how the kids have grown and changed. It’s become the favorite (and expected) Christmas gift! Given that most of the actual prints I have from before the digital photo era are still not nicely archived (it’s on the never ending to-do list), I really don’t feel bad about now printing and archiving the digital ones. We upload them all to flicker and make sure we remind the family of the URL on a regular basis, and let them know that if they want prints, let us know which ones and we can get them. We take a bazillion pictures. Even if I did scrap book them, we wouldn’t have the space for all those albums. So we have some choice ones in photo collage frames, and have the yearly photo books. And the ever growing digital collection.

Another fun idea for a stockpile of baby/kids photos… put them on your computer screensaver or a digital photo frame that rotates the photos. My little one loves to see himself on my laptop screen and it’s fun to see the older photos sprinkled in. The only drawback: I end up staring at photos instead of working!

Hi, I am a personal photo organizer and I help people reconnect with their photos. I take them from photo overload to photo peace of mind. If you need some help visit http://www.appo.org and search for your state. The Association of Personal Photo Organizers is a network of professionals dedicated to telling clients’ stories. Through images, words, and creatively designed photo books, scrapbooks, and more, Photo Organizers are bringing cherished memories back into clients’ lives.

I plan on using Shutterfly to make photo books, although my daughter is almost two and it hasn’t happened yet. What I do manage to do is use Red Stamp’s app to make photo thank you cards. It’s easy, reasonably priced ($1.99 for a printed card, postage included), and people love them.

Since high school, I’ve always taken pictures of anything and everything and have many of the old-style albums with printed photos to prove it. But when we had a baby in 2007, we switched to digital cameras and three years quickly passed….then I realized I didn’t have a single picture printed and was in sudden fear of “how do I organize these MILLIONs of photos” and “how do i get them all printed” and “how do I tell all the stories”, you get the idea. I came across the idea of printing all the photos neatly onto individual pages in a photo book and found a happy medium between my fetish with scrapbooking and the photo-happy-me! For storing – all photos on the computer with a back-up on our external hard-drive. For organizing, I create folders in the computer; sorted by year – then month – then event (i.e. “baby learned to climb today” or “visit with the cousins”). For printing – I use a variety of websites such as Blurb, shutterfly, or Paper Coterie. It’s really fast to make books with my system of organizing; I just create the book layout then look at my name/date on the picture folder, then drag and drop the photos. My most recent exciting book is one more like a journal…I’ve been using the “Notes” app on my I-phone to note down the cute stuff my little boys say. Once I had a year’s worth of text, I put it into book-form along with some photos of the boys so I’d remember what they looked like when they said such funny things! ((Hey, I should do a tutorial on this!)) Here’s the link to my post about it:http://busybagcentral.blogspot.com/2012/08/journaling-cutenessabsolutely-worth.html It’s good to heard what other people are doing! Thanks for the post!